Well-Schooled in Murder (5 page)

For the last four weeks, work had been an anodyne. She turned to it now, backing away from the bird, clutching her equipment in hands that were cold.

The job called for a set of photographs which reflected the piece of literature that had inspired them. Since late February, Deborah had explored the Brontës’ Yorkshire and given herself over to Ponden Hall and High Withens; she had set up camera and tripod for a moonlit examination of Tintern Abbey; she had photographed the Cobb and most particularly Granny’s Teeth from which Louisa Musgrove took her fatal fall; she had wandered the tournament field in Ashby de la Zouch, sat on the sidelines and watched the comings and goings in the pump room in Bath, walked the streets of Dorchester looking for the slow hand of destiny that destroyed Michael Henchard, and felt the enchantment of Hill Top Farm.

In each case, the site itself—and her research into the literature that had grown from it—inspired her camera. But as she looked round this final location and caught sight of the two structures that, from their proximity to the church, had to be the tombs she had come to inspect, she felt the pricking of irritation. How on earth, she thought, was she ever going to make something so inordinately mundane look attractive?

The tombs were identical, constructed of brick, slabbed across the top with lichened stone. The only decorative detail that had been supplied them had been done so by two hundred years of visitors who had obligingly carved their names into the bricks. Deborah sighed, stepped back, and examined the church.

Even here there was little scope for artistry. The building fought with itself, two different periods of architecture moulded together to form a whole. Plain fifteenth-century Tudor windows set into a faded redbrick wall existed hand-in-glove with the perpendicular structure of a lancet window nearby, this set into the older chalk and flint of the Norman chancel. The effect could hardly be called picturesque.

Deborah frowned. “A disaster,” she murmured. From her camera case she took the rough manuscript of the book which her pictures would illustrate and, spreading several pages across the top of Thomas Gray’s tomb, she spent a few minutes reading not only “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” but also the interpretation of the poem supplied by the Cambridge don whose manuscript this was. Her eyes stopped thoughtfully, with growing understanding, upon the poem’s eleventh stanza. She dwelt upon it.

Can storied urn or animated bust,

Back to its mansion call the fleeting breath?

Can honour’s voice provoke the silent dust,

Or flatt’ry soothe the dull cold ear of death?

She looked up, seeing the graveyard as Gray had intended her to see it, knowing that her photographs had to reflect the simplicity of life that the poet had sought to celebrate with his words. She cleared her papers from the tomb and set up her tripod.

It would be nothing lush, nothing clever, just photographs that used light and dark, angle and depth to depict the innocence and beauty of a country evening at dusk. She worked to capture the humble quality of the environment in which Gray’s rude forefathers of the hamlet were sleeping, completing her catalogue of impressions with a photograph of the yew tree under which the poet ostensibly wrote his verse.

That done, she stepped away from her equipment and gazed towards the east, towards London. There was, she knew, no more putting it off. There was no further excuse to keep her from home. But she needed preparation prior to facing her husband. She sought it by going into the church.

Her curse, she saw, would be the centrepiece of the nave, that object upon which her eyes fell when the door closed behind her. It was an octagonal marble baptismal font, dwarfed beneath the arched timber ceiling. Each side of the font bore intricate carving, and two tall pewter candlesticks stood behind it, waiting to be lit for the ceremony that brought another child to Christianity.

Deborah walked to the font and touched the smooth oak that covered it. Just for a moment, she let herself imagine the infant in her arms, the tender pressure of its head against her breast. She let herself hear its cry of indignation as the water poured over its sweet, defenceless brow. She let herself feel the tiny, fragile hand curve over her finger. She let herself believe that she had not—this fourth time in eighteen months—miscarried Simon’s child. She let herself pretend that she had not been in hospital, that the last conversation with her doctor had never occurred. But his words intruded. She could not escape.

“An abortion doesn’t necessarily preclude the possibility of future successful pregnancies, Deborah. But in some cases it might. You said it was more than six years ago. There might have been complications. Scarring, that sort of thing. We won’t know that for a certainty until we do some thorough tests. So if you and your husband really want—”

“No!”

The doctor’s face had shown immediate comprehension. “Then Simon doesn’t know?”

“I was only eighteen. I was in America. He doesn’t…he
can’t…
”

Even now she reeled from the thought of that. She felt in panic for the edge of a pew and, jerking open its small door, she stumbled inside and dropped onto the seat.

You will, she told herself with a ruthless desire to inflict as much pain as possible, never have another child. You might have had one once. You might have felt that frail life take shape within your body. But you destroyed it, discarded it, threw it away. Now you pay. Now you are punished in the only coin you can understand. You will never have Simon’s child. Another woman might. Another woman could. But the mingling of your body and your love with Simon’s will not produce a child. That will never happen. You will not do this.

She stared at the needlepoint kneelers that hung against the back of the pew, each one centred with a cross, each one directing her to turn to the Lord to assuage a despair that was without limit. Musty-smelling blue and red hymnals offered her songs of praise and thanksgiving. Dusty silk poppy wreaths hung against the far walls, and even at this distance Deborah could read the signs beneath them.
Brownies, Girl Guides, Rangers of Stoke Poges
. There was no comfort here.

She left the pew, walked to the altar rail. This too had its message, lettered in yellow onto a faded blue pad that covered the stones: “Come unto me all ye that travail and are heavy laden and I will refresh you.”

Refresh
, she thought bitterly,
but not change, not cure, and not forgive. There is no miracle here for me, no Lourdes to bathe in, no laying-on of hands, no absolution
. She left the church.

Outside, the sun was beginning to set. Deborah retrieved her equipment and retraced her steps down the path towards her car. At the interior lych gate, she turned for a last look at the church, as if it might give her the peace of mind she sought. The setting sun was shooting up final rays of dying light, like an aureole that backdropped the trees behind the church and the crenellated Norman tower that housed its bells.

At another time and without a thought, she would have taken a photograph, capturing the slow change in the sky’s hue as the day’s death intensified the sunset. But at this moment she could only watch the light’s beauty fade and fail, and she knew she could no longer avoid the homecoming and Simon’s unsuspecting, unconditional love.

Across her path just inches from her feet, two squirrels scampered, chattering angrily. They were spoiling with one another over a tidbit of food, each determined to be victor in the fray. They raced round the side of an elaborate marble tomb at the graveyard’s edge and scrambled onto the waist-high flintstone wall that separated the church property from the back field of a local farm, screened off by several heavy-limbed conifers. Back and forth they flew along the top of the wall, first one then the other surging into the attack. Paws, teeth, tiny legs all embroiled in a fight as the cherished food dropped onto the ground below.

It was the diversion Deborah needed. “Here, no!” she said. “Don’t fight. Stop it! Now!”

She approached the two animals and, seeing her coming, they fled over the side of the wall and up into the trees.

“Well, at least that’s better than fighting, isn’t it?” she said, looking up into the branches that overhung the graveyard. “Behave yourselves now. It’s not polite to quarrel. It’s not even the place.”

One of the squirrels was tucked into the joint of a branch and the tree trunk. The other had disappeared. But the one that remained watched her with bright eyes from his position of safety. After a moment, feeling secure, he began to groom himself, rubbing paws sleepily over his face as if he intended to nap.

“I wouldn’t be so sure of myself if I were you,” Deborah warned. “That little bully is probably waiting for just this sort of opportunity to pounce again. Where do you suppose he’s gone?”

She started to look for the other squirrel, moving her eyes along the branches fruitlessly and then dropping them after a time to the ground.

“You don’t think he’s clever enough to—”

Her voice died. Her mouth was instantly dry. Words fled. Thoughts dissolved.

A child’s naked body was lying beneath the tree.

3

Horror immobilised her. It was a shaft of ice driven down the length of her spine, rooting her to the spot. Details intensified, impelled into her brain by the force of shock.

Deborah felt her lips part, felt the rush of air distend her lungs with an unnatural force. Only a terrified shriek could dispel the air fast enough, before her lungs burst and left her helpless.

Yet she couldn’t cry out and even if she did so, there was no one nearby to hear her. So she only whispered, “Oh God.” Then uselessly, “Simon.” And then, although she didn’t want to do so, she stared, hands drawn into fists and muscles coiled, ready to run if she had to, when she could.

The child was lying partially on its stomach just beyond the flintstone wall in a bed of bloomless creeping jenny. By the length and the cut of hair it appeared to be a boy. He was very dead.

Even if Deborah had been silly enough or hysterical enough to convince herself that he was merely asleep, explaining why he would be sleeping completely naked in a late afternoon growing colder by the minute was an impossibility. And why under a tree in a copse of pines where the temperature was even lower than it would be had he sought out the last rays of the afternoon sun? And why would he sleep in that unusual position, with his right hip taking the burden of his weight and his legs splayed out, and his right arm twisted awkwardly so that it was doubled up beneath itself, and his head turned to the left with three quarters of it pressed into the ground, into the creeping jenny? Yet his skin was quite flushed—very nearly red—and surely that indicated warmth, life, the pulse and flow of blood….

The squirrels resumed their bickering, racing down the tree that had sheltered them, scampering over the inert form near the trunk. The tiny claw of the lead squirrel caught at the flesh of the child’s left thigh, held, and made the animal a prisoner. Wild chattering erupted, companion to a frantic scramble for freedom. The proximity of his pursuer gave fire to the squirrel’s need to escape. The child’s flesh tore. The animal vanished.

Deborah saw that no blood seeped from the wound the claw had made, small though it was. That seemed momentarily odd until she remembered that the dead do not bleed. Only the living have that pleasure.

At last she cried out, spinning away. But every impression stayed so vividly before her that she knew she might as well have gone on staring forever. A leaf caught in hair the colour of walnuts; a crescent scar cradling the left kneecap; a pear-shaped birthmark at the base of the spine; and running along the length of the visible parts of the left side of the body, an odd bruising of the flesh, as if the child had been hurled down on his side sometime in the past.

He could have been asleep. He
should
have been asleep. But even Deborah’s brief viewing of him from a distance of two yards had allowed her to see the telling abrasions at his wrists and ankles: stark white flecks of dead skin against a background that was red and inflamed. She knew what that meant. She guessed what the uniform circular burns along the tender flesh of his inner arm meant as well.

He wasn’t asleep. Death had not come to him as a friend.

“God,
God
.” she cried out.